Nine words, and a conversation in which only one side is audible. Dave Bonta's "Soliloquizing" shows a speaker walking at night, alone, and answering themselves. The paradox is hidden in the verb. You can't answer without being asked, so a question has been put somewhere, by someone, and the poem never tells us what it was. We get the reply and have to guess at the rest.
The title helps with the guessing. A soliloquy is speech by someone with no listener, the stage convention in which a character thinks aloud while the audience overhears. The word is built from Latin roots for "alone" and "speak," so the title already contains the poem's situation. But "Soliloquizing" is a long, formal, slightly grand word, and the poem beneath it is almost bare: "all alone," "I answer myself," "walking in the night." The gap between the two is gently funny. A word made for theatres has ended up on a dark road with one person and no stage.
The central idea is that being alone is not the same as being empty. "All alone" is a stock phrase, the kind that usually signals a lament, and the opening line seems to promise sadness. Then the second line undercuts it. The speaker is by themselves, yet a dialogue is going on, because one mind can be two voices, one asking and one replying. There is even a pun in the phrase, since "alone" began as "all one." The speaker is wholly one person and also, in the next breath, a pair. The poem leaves open whether this is comfort or a symptom of loneliness, and the flat, matter-of-fact tone refuses to say.
The construction is spare. There is no rhyme and no punctuation, and the only capital in the body of the poem is the pronoun "I," which stands out as a single upright letter in a lowercase scene. The lines run three, five and five syllables, close to the compression of haiku without following its pattern. Sound does the work rhyme might have done. The long "i" of "I" comes back in "myself" and again in "night," so the vowel answers itself just as the speaker does. The "l" of "all," "alone" and "myself" hums through the lines too and ties the speaker's isolation to the speaker's self-address.
The rhythm suits a walk. "I answer myself" falls into a rough step-step pattern, with the weight landing on "an-" and "-self." "Walking in the night" then moves like footsteps, a stress on "walk," two light syllables, and a final stress on "night." The line is about walking and also sounds like it. The participle "walking" matters as well, because it is ongoing, like the title's "-ing" ending. Nothing is completed. And with no full stop, the poem simply stops, as if the walking and the talking carry on past the edge of the page.
"Night" is a well-chosen last word. Darkness gives privacy, since nobody can see the speaker's lips moving or hear them talking to no one. It also suggests the unknown, the space where questions come up that daylight keeps quiet. The poem doesn't say whether the speaker is troubled, content or simply thinking aloud, and that withholding keeps the lines open. A reader can supply a worry, a decision, or a quiet joke at one's own expense.
There is an irony the poem never points out. The speaker claims to be "all alone," yet we are listening. The reader becomes the audience of the soliloquy, the overhearer the stage convention always needs. By the end the poem has done what it describes. It pretends to be private speech while being heard, and it contains two voices, the silent question and the spoken answer, inside one voice.
That is what makes it worth a second look. Three short lines manage a paradox, a mood and a movement, and they leave room for the reader to supply the missing question. It's a good example of how little a poem needs to suggest a whole inner life.